David Harvey: Institutional Reliability - An Erosion of Trust and Confidence?

This started as an overview of the problems recently experienced by Radio New Zealand but became a wider consideration of confidence in our institutions of which the Fourth Estate is a very important part. Inquiries may tell us what really happened at RNZ but the performance of others who occupy the corridors of power leaves much to be desired. Perhaps those who criticise contrarians and dissidents need to look in the mirror to find out why.

Members of the media have often been referred to as the eyes and ears of the public. It is their function to bring to the attention of the public matters of public concern. Journalists are traditionally those who are engaged in the important democratic function of gathering, transmitting, disseminating and commenting on news.

An important aspect of this involves monitoring and reporting on political matters including the day-to-day operations of Government and the performance of its politicians. This helps to assist citizens in assessing Government performance and ultimately holding the Government accountable. Journalists also have an important role to play in the concept of open justice and the reporting of matters before the court.

Shayne Currie in the NZ Herald for 16 June made the following observations:

Newsrooms are unique places, fuelled by caffeine, creative ideas, and a sense of purpose.

They are not factory lines producing paperclips or fast-food outlets churning out cookie-cutter hamburgers and sides of fries.

Every interview and story has nuance and unique detail; there are so many variables in newsgathering. And the difference between a humming news day and a slow, boring slog is stark.

Newsrooms and journalists operate in a high-trust environment, more so than many other industries. Trust that we will handle and present people’s stories and difficult topics with care and sensitivity; that we will get those stories right, and that we’re fair and balanced.

Reporters play a critical role in crafting the first draft of history. We place trust in our journalists that they are accurately recording, and portraying, what a person has said to them. We place trust in editors to probe that work – to query any missing points or clarify confusing passages. We place trust in production staff and digital editors to edit and present that journalism with precision.

And we trust that our journalists have actually spoken to a person in the first place…..

Trust is journalism’s biggest currency. We all, as an industry, have a job to rebuild people’s trust in media, especially after three years of polarised rage. We have a huge mission to highlight and combat a rising tide of disinformation, much of it on social media.

Newsrooms and editorial teams sign up to codes of conduct, and our newsrooms and media businesses are signatories to Media Council and Broadcasting Standards Authority principles and codes. We are governed by the law, too – the Defamation Act chief among them.

Will we ever avoid the extremely rare rotten apples? Unlikely.

No one in the news industry will be feeling any joy about what’s allegedly unfolded at RNZ. The broadcaster will no doubt find ways to tighten systems, and we will all heed the lessons. Newsrooms across New Zealand, including our own here at NZME, will be looking carefully, once again, at processes.

Ultimately a newsroom relies on the high-trust principles that drive the calling to our craft in the first place. No matter how many extra sets of eyes you add to the editing and production oversight, the last-touch person might still turn out to be that rotten apple.

Currie’s article tells of a couple of incidents of rogue journalists and the concerns that they cause for media reputation and trustworthiness.

News media have been referred to as the Fourth Estate. This term refers to the press and news media both in explicit capacity of advocacy and implicit ability to frame political issues.

The Fourth Estate and its members enjoy certain privileges that are not available to “citizen journalists.” They are able to claim privilege in respect of confidential sources. They can, upon compliance with the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Act, sit in on closed as well as open Court hearings although their ability to report those proceedings may be the subject of non-publication orders. They are entitled to membership of the Press Gallery and to report on the proceedings of Parliament and attend press conferences called by Members of Parliament.

The News media are subject to regulatory controls. I have referred to the Broadcasting Act and the New Zealand Media Council. These organisations ensure the integrity and reliability of news reporting and dissemination undertaken by the Fourth Estate.

The importance of the Fourth Estate as a reliable and trustworthy source of information was underlined during the course of the Covid crisis by the establishment of the Public Interest Journalism Fund which was designed to support New Zealand’s media to continue to produce stories that keep New Zealanders informed and engaged, and support a healthy democracy. This fund has been responsible for some terrible optics. Although the fund was supportive of the Fourth Estate it really didn’t look good for a Government, at a time of crisis and considerable divisiveness within society, to be channeling large sums of money albeit indirectly in the direction of a media that could be viewed as adopting a co-operative approach to Government “truths”.

The recent revelations about the editing of Reuters copy by Radio New Zealand (I shall use a collective because it is not established whether this is a rogue sub-editor or a systemic problem within Radio New Zealand) must be a cause for concern not only for RNZ but for Mainstream Media generally. What has happened at RNZ taints the whole Fourth Estate which might have been financially assisted by the PIJF but in terms of perception is seen as complacent if not complicit with the Government.

This must be of concern because those who occupy a contrarian position have suggested that Mainstream Media are part of a conspiracy, cannot be relied upon, and occupy a particular position on the political spectrum (Radio NZ has been referred to for some years as “Red Radio”). The contrarian voices will no doubt simply say “Told you so” or “we knew it all along”

It would seem that RNZ has shot itself in the foot and the rest of MSM are collateral damage.

That said there are incidents of spin or tilt to certain stories in MSM apart from the RNZ revelations. A very revealing article by Charlie Mitchell appeared in Stuff for 17 June 2023. In it he discussed the way in which lead paragraphs of news articles can be edited to change emphasis or nuance.

The article is helpful and timely – indeed it probably would not have been necessary had it not been for the RNZ controversy. It brings a level of transparency to the process of the creation of news content. At the same time it demonstrates how easy it is to shift emphasis and to “spin” a story. One of the revelations made – and one wonders whether the sub-editor mentioned, Mick Hall, is being thrown under the bus – is about the sub-editor’s views on foreign policy. I had never heard of the term “tankies” so you learn something new every day.

But what do these revelations do for public confidence in the news media. It does demonstrate that the line between pure objectivity and bias is paper-thin. And then there is the term beloved of many these days – unconscious bias. I think that term means bias of which person A is unaware but which becomes apparent to person B.

Sometimes the bias becomes apparent. Whenever certain contrarians are mentioned they are described as “conspiracy theorists” or in similar derogatory terms. These terms are obviously used to reinforce attacks on credibility or to diminish the value of their opinions.

That may be fine in an opinion piece but in a news report it is not good enough. The trouble is that many news stories (so-called) stray into the field of opinion so it becomes difficult to separate the two. To be fair some news outlets make the distinction in a story headline, but my concern relates to the news stories that stray over the line.

The position in which we find ourselves is this. In the past we have had a high degree of trust in mainstream media. If the story appeared in a newspaper, on TV or on a news broadcast from RNZ consumers did not need to go behind it. Now it would seem that we may have to view what we see on the page, the screen or on the airwaves with a degree of scepticism. That may have to be combined with citizen fact checking.

To add to the mix there was an opinion piece by Janet Wilson – again in Stuff for 17 June – entitled “Ditch the rancour, we need grown-up political debate”. Although the headline was punchy it failed to address some of the more nuanced issues that Wilson raised. She notes in the first paragraph:

If trust is the glue that holds us together as a functioning society, then the loss of that trust can be graphically charted between the first Covid lockdown and the parliamentary protest.

On March 23, 2020, then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s first speech from the Podium of Truth, announcing the first lockdown, became a rallying cry that united us as a nation as we hunkered down together. Aotearoa New Zealand was hailed worldwide as the-little-country-that-could.

Two short but traumatic years later, on March 2, 2022, that trust – in ourselves, in the institutions that represent our values – shattered like a broken splintered mirror as protesters, marginalised and angry, set fire to Parliament’s playground. Scientists say this lack of trust, what they call social cohesion, is becoming increasingly critical, and more research is needed to prevent it eroding further.

I quibble with the characterization of trust as social cohesion. Social cohesion implies – for me anyway – uncritical conformity. Trust on the other hand, especially in the societal sense – involves confidence in our institutions – the Legislature, the Executive, the Courts, the Bureaucracy - that they are performing their functions correctly and in the interests of society.

Later in the article Wilson refers to a report from a University of Auckland think tank which looks at two types of trust - vertical trust, between the government, its institutions and the governed, and horizontal trust, those of us from different backgrounds who need that trust to co-operate. There is expressed a need to return civility to the public square.

The difficulty is that the erosion of trust in our institutions has led to disenchantment, disagreements and distress – all those emotions give rise to a form of betrayal and dismay that underpinned the Parliament Protest.

That sense of disenchantment and of a level of cynicism towards institutions has not been help by a series of “unfortunate events” in Wellington involving sudden departures from caucus, failures to declare conflicts of interest, failure to dispose of assets when advised to do so giving rise to a conflict of interest perception, a complex conflict of interest situation involving a Member of Parliament, an electorate office and a Race Relations Commissioner. And then there was the revelation of a massive problem involving the same Race Relations Commissioner who resigned before he was ignominiously sacked. These shenanigans inspire little confidence in those in power and are continually corrosive of the trust and confidence that we should have in our institutions.

It would seem that Mainstream Media is not the only institution that has a large degree of trust and confidence rebuilding to do.

David Harvey is a former District Court Judge and Mastermind champion, as well as an award winning writer who blogs at the substack site A Halflings View. This article was originally published HERE.